


where's my love

by aghamora



Series: Flaurel Ficlets [41]
Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e01 We're Good People Now, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 12:24:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8143961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: It’s the night he leaves that he gets the first message from her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is fucking depressing, and the season premiere was fucking depressing too so I guess I just wanted to make it all worse!! I love suffering and Death.
> 
> Enjoy? Enjoy. :)

It’s the night he leaves that he gets the first message from her.

“Where are you? I’m at your place, and… everything’s gone, Frank, what the hell’s going on? Where-” Her voice catches. She clears her throat to steady it, speaking with renewed determination. “Call me when you get this.” And the line goes dead with a hasty  _click._

He should ditch his phone. He’s already ditched the hair and beard and three piece suits and pretty much every scrap of his identity he had left. Phones can be traced. Phones can be found, get _him_ found. He’s gotta commit. All or nothing. Life or death. He killed Frank Delfino and buried him six feet under, and he should ditch his phone too.

He doesn’t. Can’t.

She calls him at least twenty times, leaves a message with every one. Sends increasingly frantic texts, more and more laden with curse words as the hours creep by, and he drives out of town, hands steady on the wheel, eyes on the road, not answering a single one of them. For his own good. For hers.

She doesn’t call for two days, after that.  _Good._  She doesn’t care. She’ll move on. He’s happy. He’s glad.

Except he’s not. Not at all.

He’s at a shitty motel upstate when he gets the next one.

“Where are you?” She starts off demanding, all full of that fire he’s always loved about her. He can picture her then, the clenching of her jaw, the flaring of her nostrils, narrowing of her eyes. How beautiful she’d always looked, even while fuming mad at him. “Bonnie says she hasn’t heard from you… Annalise, too. So what? You’re gone?” A note of resignation creeps into her tone. “I don’t know… if you’re even gonna get this. But just – call me. Please. I need to-” She stops, sucks in what sounds like a shaky breath. “I need to know you’re okay, you fucking idiot.”

The last part makes him laugh. Makes him miss her so much he aches.

He doesn’t call. He doesn’t have anything to say, and if he does he’s revisiting the past. Clean break. Quitting Laurel Castillo cold turkey. She’s better off like this. He’s a man on the run and fugitive and killer, and she’s better off without him.

She calls every day, for a while. 

Then, slowly, the calls start to drop off.

A week passes, then two, bleeding into each other hazily, like watercolors. He keeps on the move, crossing state lines. New York. Three weeks. Massachusetts. Four. Logically he knows he should be halfway across the country by now, well out of harm’s way – but Annalise isn’t halfway across the country. He can’t make things right halfway across the country. He revolves around Philly like gravity, like it’s his sun and he’s hopelessly circling it; a little dark dead planet in that great abyss of the galaxy.

Annalise isn’t halfway across the country. Neither is Laurel. He stays close, consciously and unconsciously.

She leaves a message again, five weeks in.

“Frank…” Her voice starts out small – smaller than he’s ever heard. Tired. She sounds tired, and he wonders irrationally if she’d called him just before sleeping, called to listen to his voice recording. Hear his voice. Hear  _him_. “I don’t know if you’re gonna get this. I don’t even know if you still have your phone, God, you’re so stupid…” She pauses there. “I don’t get it. I don’t get it why you just… left, and…” She’s not crying, but her voice sounds thick, strained. He aches at the sound. He doesn’t want her to waste her tears on him, and at the same time there’s nothing he wants more. “I hate you for this. I hate you so  _much_.”

Good, he thinks.  _Hate me. Hate me._  It’s better that way.

It’s always been better that way.

The calls keep coming. Not often – once a week, maybe, and then not once a week anymore. Once every two. They grow less and less frequent and she grows more and more resigned in each, her voice empty, like she thinks she’s talking to a ghost, a dead man, and maybe she is.

Frank Delfino is dead. He no longer recognizes the man in the mirror.

“I don’t know why I’m still calling you,” she mutters into the phone late one night, again; she always seems to call late at night, when everything is still and maybe, just maybe, she can’t block out thoughts of him anymore. Her voice is raspy, weak with exhaustion. “I don’t think you’re even getting these. I don’t… know why I do this to myself. But I could never stay away, huh?” A pause. Long. So long he wonders if she’s dropped the phone and fallen asleep, but his ears perk up when she keeps going. “I should’ve told you to get over it. That night. When I was gonna quit. I should’ve quit and never looked back.” Pause again. Heavier. “I should’ve done a lot of things. And… and I’m not gonna call again. This is it. This is… wherever you are. Wherever you went.” His throat locks up. Her voice trembles faintly, on the other end. “This is goodbye.”

The line goes dead. He feels dead, too. Inside and out.

He saves that message. Plays it on repeat as he lays in bed wide awake at 4 A.M., restless and sweaty in the summer heat in the crappy motel with broken AC and flies buzzing around his head. Listens to the sweet lilt of her voice in his ear. If he closes his eyes he thinks for a moment he can almost imagine the warmth of her beside him, the calm, tidal inhale and exhale of her breathing.

She says she won’t call again. But she does.

It’s a drunk dial, the next time.

“I lied,” she drawls, and he knows she’s drunk off her ass in seconds, can tell by the distinctive slur of her words. “Guess what? Here I am, calling again. And… but this time is the last time. Because I hate you.” She hiccups. “I hate you for what you did. You made me think… you were some kinda good guy! Family man. Fucking… misunderstood hitman.” Her voice wobbles. She always does get weepy when she’s drunk, but this is different. Darker. “I hate you for that the most, you know? Lying to me. I fucking hate you, that… that was the worst thing you did. You made me love you. I  _loved_ you. And I fucking hate you for that too.” She’s speaking through her teeth now, furious and half-sobbing, and he can’t breathe, thinks his chest cavity is all of two seconds away from collapsing in on itself and killing him. “Why’d you leave? You told me you loved me, and… and you left me.” Her voice is smaller, suddenly. Positively tiny. “Why’d you do that?”

He’s hurt her. It kills him. He’s hurt her and he’s a murderer and he’s done unspeakable things, and somehow hurting her this way feels worse than any crime he’s ever committed in his life. He left her. It’s for her own good.

He’s having a harder time believing that these days, though.

Three weeks pass. Then, another voicemail.

“I’m going to Mexico for the summer, to visit my mom. You know. In case you were… wondering what’s going on with me these days. Maybe you’re there, too. Maybe… we’ll run into each other.” She’s sober this time, and gives a half-laugh, half-scoff, ostensibly at her own ridiculousness. “I can’t believe I’m doing this, y’know. Having a conversation with your voicemail. I feel stupid, it’s…” A pause. She seems to rethink wherever she’d been going what that. “Anyway, the year’s over. I, uh, passed all my finals, somehow. The others are doing okay too. Not that you care about them or anything, but.” She sighs. “I think maybe you’re getting these. I don’t know. Or maybe you’re dead. But I just… I don’t know. Wanted you to know I’m okay, wherever you are.” Laurel pauses. It’s not convincing. He aches so bad he wants to die. “I am. Okay.” One final break. Then: “I really hate you, you know that?”

That’s how she starts closing her messages.  _I hate you_ , like other normal people might say I love you. Never biting or harsh; always solemn and soft and sad. He wants to believe her, and can’t. He knows she doesn’t hate him. No matter how much he may hate himself.

Laurel doesn’t have the capacity to hate, doesn’t have it in her. She’s too good to hate.

A month. Two. Summer ends, and nothing from her. He thinks maybe she’s forgotten, moved on, fallen for some Mexican summer fling on a beach in Acapulco or Tulum, or something. Then-

“Your mailbox isn’t full, so I know that means you’re checking your messages and not dead somewhere,” she tells him matter-of-factly one afternoon, late summer, right around the start of the school year. And she’s right, and now that she seems to realize he’ll hear this her voice is decidedly sharper, words heavy with purpose. “I just wanted to say…” He holds his breath, almost unconsciously. She lets out a sigh, deep in her lungs, with that kind of sadness he hates hearing, because he wants her to be happy,  _God_ , that’s all he fucking wants. “I hate you.”

_I hate you._  Again. Like  _I love you_. But she hates him, and she’s right to hate him. He wants her to. He does.

And one day he’ll figure it out, how to do it. Get back into Annalise’s good graces. Come home to his twisted little family. Fix things. Maybe. But part of him knows he’s beyond the point of redemption, and forgiveness was an exit sign off the highway he passed miles ago. And he loves her. So much it’s in his bones, in every part of him, and he tells himself all he cares about is getting back to Annalise, but God.  _God_.

All he really wants is her. All he’s ever wanted.

_I hate you._

He’s Hades. She’s Persephone. All he’d ever do, all he’s ever  _done_ , is drag her down with him to hell. He remembers the look on her face, the night he’d told her about Lila; how he’d destroyed her. And if he has to live the rest of his life without her so she can be happy, have a shot with someone better, someone  _normal_ even though she sure as fuck is not normal, he’ll do that. He’ll do that for her. Of course he will.

_I hate you. I love you._

_And the truth is I don’t love you back. So we’re done. It’s over._

He’s Hades. She’s Persephone. A fucked-up kind of Persephone, maybe, with blood on her dainty hands, sowing death and decay instead of springtime, but Persephone nonetheless. Still better than him. Still more than he’s ever deserved. His, once. She’d been  _his_. Not for long, not long enough to justify being so in love with her, falling so hard so fast.

But she’d been his. Once.

Things are better off this way. Better off like this. He’s gonna tell himself that until one day he wakes up and maybe half-believes it, at least. He tells himself that as he lies in bed at night, replaying her messages over and over like a poor, hopeless, lovesick son of a bitch. Never able to bring himself to delete them.

Never able to let go.

_I love you. I love you. I love you._

_I’ll love you ‘til I die._


End file.
